Venture with Grace

Rob Gelick is the General Manager of Yahoo Mail and an Emmy Award–winning C-level product leader who previously, as Chief Product Officer of Paramount, scaled Paramount+ from zero to more than 60 million global subscribers and billions in revenue. During his tenure at Paramount, Rob Gelick oversaw major streaming portfolios including Pluto TV, Pluto TV, Showtime, CBS, MTV, and Nickelodeon, leading...

David Zeng is Co-Founder and CTO of Beacons AI, the Y Combinator-backed all-in-one platform powering 9M+ creators with AI-native tools for link-in-bio pages, websites, email marketing, ecommerce, and monetization across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and more—helping solopreneurs turn brand deals, affiliates, and digital products into sustainable businesses without tech headaches. A Stanford PhD in s...

Scott Woody is Co-Founder and CEO of Metronome, the leading usage-based billing platform empowering SaaS companies to model flexible pricing strategies, iterate rapidly without engineering bottlenecks, and turn billing into a growth engine amid 2026's shift from seats to consumption models. With prior stints as CTO at Metronome since 2019 and Director of Engineering at Dropbox where he scaled...

Venture Livestream with Grace Gong

Ray Wu is a seasoned venture capitalist with over 20 years of investing experience across a wide range of industries and geographies. Before joining Alumni Ventures, Ray Wu was a partner and adviser at several global venture funds focusing on AI, Web3, FinTech and SaaS investment opportunities across the U.S. and Asia Pacific. Earlier, he spent more than 10 years in the corporate venture space: He...

Tobias Citron serves as Partner at Primary Venture Partners, leading cybersecurity investments and incubating pre-seed startups in AI infra, data tools, and developer platforms like Etched AI, Cake AI, Stanza, and SparkAI (acquired by John Deere), building NYC's seed ecosystem since 2021. A Princeton public policy alum and Wharton MBA, he cut his teeth as founding GM at Prehype's Radicle v...

Amir Haleem founded Nova Labs (formerly Helium) in 2013, pioneering the world's largest decentralized wireless network that powers IoT sensors and Helium Mobile—a blockchain-based phone service now integrated with AT&T, T-Mobile, and Google Fi, rewarding node operators with crypto for coverage. Ex-CTO of gaming startup Diversion and original Battlefield 1942 engineer at DICE, the esports c...

Aaron Cannon is the co-founder and CEO of Outset, where he’s leading the development of the world’s first agent-led research platform powered by AI-moderated interviews. He brings over a decade of experience in product strategy and leadership from roles at Tesla, Triplebyte, and Deloitte, with a passion for building tools that bridge design, business, and user research. Aaron studied economics and...

Kylan Gibbs is the co-founder & CEO of Inworld AI, the core infrastructure for real-time, multimodal AI applications at global consumer scale. Inworld is a product-focused research lab delivering sub-500ms, high-QPS AI experiences via specialized models and streaming architectures that most teams can’t build in-house. Under Kylan’s leadership, Inworld has launched products including Inworld TT...

Anand Chandrasekaran is the Managing Partner of Celesta. Prior to joining Celesta, Anand Chandrasekaran co-founded and was President of Crescendo, an AI-first contact center business, co-created and backed by General Catalyst (GC). He is a former Partner and Venture Advisor at GC. Earlier in his career he was CPO and a product leader for two decades at Five9, Meta (Messenger), Bharti Airtel, Snapd...

Nico Laqua is the CEO/CTO and Co-Founder of Corgi (YC S24), the first fully automated AI-native insurance carrier based in San Francisco, aiming to rebuild the $1T+ industry through compute-speed underwriting, claims processing, and modular coverage like D&O, Cyber, General Liability, and innovative AI Liability for tech glitches. Previously, he founded Basket Entertainment, scaling a gaming p...

Mohit Aron is the founder of Cohesity and Nutanix and now he’s building Stealth AI startup. He is famous for being the founder of both. Mohit Aron built Cohesity into a multi-billion-dollar data protection unicorn backed by Sequoia, Nvidia, and others after co-founding and scaling Nutanix as CTO to public market leadership with hyper-converged infrastructure that redefined enterprise storage. A Ri...

Joseph Ros is a Partner and General Manager at Entrepreneur First (EF), the pioneering global platform that invests in exceptional individuals before they have an idea or co-founder. Based in San Francisco, Joseph has backed early-stage technology companies across AI, biotech, robotics, hardware, and climate tech in markets including Singapore, India, Europe, and North America. At EF, he leads tal...

Vignesh Ravikumar is a Partner at Sierra Ventures. Vignesh Ravikumar joined Sierra Ventures in 2013 and focuses on investments in Enterprise SaaS, Vertical SaaS, and Digital Health/Healthcare IT. Vignesh has a background in M&A transactions for enterprise software companies, having worked at AGC Partners, a Boston-based investment bank. Vignesh holds a BS in Management Science (cum laude) and...

Allison Baum Gates is a General Partner at SemperVirens, an early-stage venture capital firm investing in healthcare, fintech, and enterprise SaaS. An experienced technology investor, author, and speaker, she has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from global LPs and backed more than 70 companies—with nine unicorns, 24 exits, and 10 board roles among them. Previously, she co-founded Fresco Cap...

Jeremiah Owyang is a Silicon Valley–based General Partner at Blitzscaling Ventures, where he leads early-stage AI investing focused on startups that can rapidly scale by leveraging network effects and defensible distribution. A longtime tech analyst and operator since the dot-com era, he has anticipated and helped shape multiple innovation waves from Web 2.0 to today’s AI agent ecosystem, drawing...

Lance Matthews is a partner at DTCP and is responsible for sourcing investment opportunities and making investment recommendations in the US. Lance’s DTCP investments include: Arctic wolf networks, Innovid (NYSE: CTV), StreetlightData (acquired by Jacobs), and Cohere. Lance joined from Touchdown Ventures, a SF based Corporate Venture firm, where he worked on company sourcing, investment analysis a...

Paul serves as the Managing Partner at Depth Ventures, a pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm focused on backing B2B SaaS founders at the intersection of finance and AI operations, leveraging his extensive operator experience as former CFO of AI-powered accounting platform Pilot and VP of Corporate Finance & Strategy at Dropbox to guide teams in building scalable business models and data-drive...

Ali Ansari is the Founder and CEO of micro1, an AI-powered recruitment platform he launched in 2022 to help companies vet and hire top global engineering and domain talent using advanced screening models. A Bay Area-based entrepreneur, he previously built a successful software development agency and other ventures, experiences that directly informed micro1’s focus on scalable, AI-led talent assess...

Or Lenchner is the CEO of Bright Data, a market-leading web data collection platform he has led since 2018, where he has driven the company’s expansion and innovation to well over $300 million in annual revenue while serving thousands of customers, including Fortune 500 enterprises, leading businesses, universities, and public sector organizations. A former founder and operator of several web-base...

Omar Haroun is the founder and CEO of Eudia, a next‑generation augmented intelligence platform for legal teams that has rapidly scaled into a nine‑figure venture‑backed business, attracting over $100M in capital from top‑tier investors on the back of triple‑digit annual growth and adoption across dozens of Fortune 500 legal departments. A second‑time legal‑AI founder, he previously co‑founded Text...

Bob Rosin is the Managing Partner at Antler US, a global early-stage venture capital firm with over $1B in assets under management and investments in more than 1,500 companies. A three-time startup founder who raised over $130M from top investors like Sequoia and Marc Andreessen, he led his third venture, Qik, to a $150M acquisition by Skype, followed by roles as VP of Business Development at Skyp...

Hemal Shah is a seasoned product leader currently serving as Product lead at OpenAI, where he focuses on integrating ChatGPT into workplace tools like Slack and developing features such as company knowledge powered by GPT-5. Previously, he was VP of Product, Head of Growth, Monetization & Expansion at Atlassian, Chief Product Officer at Root Inc. (NASDAQ: ROOT), and held product roles at Insta...

Jim Tananbaum is the founder and CEO of Foresite Capital, a U.S.-focused healthcare investment firm he launched in 2011 that manages approximately $3.5 billion in assets. With a career spanning three decades, Jim has partnered with some of the fastest-growing and most influential healthcare companies of their generation, including 10x Genomics, Amerigroup, and Jazz Pharmaceuticals. A lifelong stud...

Ashley Smith is the GP and Founder of Vermilion Cliffs Ventures, where she backs early-stage technical founders building in AI, developer tools, data, security, and infrastructure. Previously, she served as Global Vice President of Marketing at GitHub through its acquisition by Microsoft, Chief Marketing Officer at GitLab, and Venture Partner at OpenView. Her extensive go-to-market leadership at d...